Tools Your Fellow Clinicians Use to Build Thinking Skills

This past spring I had the opportunity to conduct six continuing education sessions for PESI, a non-profit organization at the forefront of continuing education for psychologists, clinical social workers, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, and mental health counselors. I presented “Innovative Strategies to Improve Executive Functions in Children and Adolescents” to a variety of thoughtful and engaged professionals who work with kids. Group work was conducted, in which I asked these professionals to describe the most effective traditional tools that they use to improve the executive functions of the children with whom they work, and hundreds of useful recommendations were given.

I have divided these recs into general categories that you might use to guide your own work. I would encourage you to look at this list as if it were the results of a survey of fellow clinicians. I am not offering detailed descriptions of many of these strategies, but I am including links to relevant blog posts and app reviews here on the LearningWorks for Kids website. You will see that there is overlap, that a few tech tools are suggested, and that some very common strategies are not listed. Strategies that are not included may not have been helpful to this particular group of clinicians, or they may have been considered so elementary as to not warrant discussion.